https://minutesof.com/on/margins/ Everyone on the record about margins: 27 verbatim quotes from 4 people, June 2020 to August 2026, in one chronology, each with a timestamp and a link to… en Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:33:04 +0000 https://minutesof.com/q/273fa3f1-13d3-4f0d-9774-ac10ff1c4250/ https://minutesof.com/q/273fa3f1-13d3-4f0d-9774-ac10ff1c4250/ “The amount of compute is going up and inference margins going up. And if you multiply those three, that's how you're getting this crazy acceleration into some of the labs plus open source,” — Gavin Baker, Invest Like the Best Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/40fc6c3a-2654-41e7-8243-0b0ea3467c2a/ https://minutesof.com/q/40fc6c3a-2654-41e7-8243-0b0ea3467c2a/ “Now, total company gross margin is closer to 55%, and if you strip away the free users, they're at about 65%.” — Dylan Patel, RAISE Summit Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:44:57 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/780c360e-dead-4817-88e5-9b6077a27b0e/ https://minutesof.com/q/780c360e-dead-4817-88e5-9b6077a27b0e/ “OpenAI late last year, their margins had were roughly 30% gross margin, but if you stripped away the free users, they were at 50%. Now, total company gross margin is closer to 55%,” — Dylan Patel, RAISE Summit Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:44:57 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/552929f1-c8ae-43c3-8501-0ab7970989ce/ https://minutesof.com/q/552929f1-c8ae-43c3-8501-0ab7970989ce/ “You look at OpenAI late last year, their margins had were roughly 30% gross margin, but if you stripped away the free users, they were at 50%.” — Dylan Patel, RAISE Summit Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:44:57 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/08d73c3f-320f-4d28-8b21-9083da9b5bf0/ https://minutesof.com/q/08d73c3f-320f-4d28-8b21-9083da9b5bf0/ “That's how profitable they're getting, and their margins on an Opus token, at least Opus 4.8 token, is north of 80 for the API price.” — Dylan Patel, Sequoia Capital Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:25 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/7f1b8019-87b9-4143-aabf-b8e158bf4a47/ https://minutesof.com/q/7f1b8019-87b9-4143-aabf-b8e158bf4a47/ “And I think by Q3 they may even be profitable, including stock based compensation. That's how profitable they're getting, and their margins on an Opus token, at least Opus 4.8 token, is north of 80” — Dylan Patel, Sequoia Capital Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:25 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/db45dba5-ecdb-452c-8fae-3210d613d134/ https://minutesof.com/q/db45dba5-ecdb-452c-8fae-3210d613d134/ “Anthropic in Q2 is profitable, their net income profitable, excluding stock based compensation. And I think by Q3 they may even be profitable, including stock based compensation.” — Dylan Patel, Sequoia Capital Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:25 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/87992770-69e8-450c-b3c4-1c7b7d80c347/ https://minutesof.com/q/87992770-69e8-450c-b3c4-1c7b7d80c347/ “I don't think there's any scenario where you just do more for less and all of a sudden everyone has 70% operating margins.” — Bill Gurley, All-In Podcast Fri, 29 May 2026 22:47:49 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/fe51e725-980e-481f-b76c-2e41dcbdde73/ https://minutesof.com/q/fe51e725-980e-481f-b76c-2e41dcbdde73/ “And then they have to be two x to four x better to justify four x better to justify their margins because that's what they're charging above cogs.” — Dylan Patel, The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:30:16 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/0af8e524-c5df-44cd-a672-ddcab4d2b6de/ https://minutesof.com/q/0af8e524-c5df-44cd-a672-ddcab4d2b6de/ “NVIDIA recognizes they're they're the leader, they're the tent pole. Hey, in one respect, they can just run faster than everyone, but it's kind of hard to be two x better than Google or or OpenAI or whoever else's internal chip, right, to justify their, you know, 75% plus margins.” — Dylan Patel, The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:30:16 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/f7b5e441-c994-41ce-a69f-fef72d295258/ https://minutesof.com/q/f7b5e441-c994-41ce-a69f-fef72d295258/ “And it's just tragic to watch all of these companies. Like you want to have an agent, It's never going to succeed.” — Gavin Baker, Invest Like the Best Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:05:00 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/f486a7c7-1b3b-4ce7-94c8-c5696df09044/ https://minutesof.com/q/f486a7c7-1b3b-4ce7-94c8-c5696df09044/ “The crazy thing is because of those efficiency gains, they're generating cash way earlier than SaaS companies did historically, but they're generating cash earlier, not because they have high gross margins, but because they have very few human employees.” — Gavin Baker, Invest Like the Best Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:05:00 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/a4e665dd-3663-4c29-8c75-622b18264f6c/ https://minutesof.com/q/a4e665dd-3663-4c29-8c75-622b18264f6c/ “I think that application SaaS companies are making the exact same mistake that brick and mortar retailers did with e commerce.” — Gavin Baker, Invest Like the Best Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:05:00 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/48ce082d-32d8-499e-930f-c182af61ba0d/ https://minutesof.com/q/48ce082d-32d8-499e-930f-c182af61ba0d/ “Well, I think that application SaaS companies are making the exact same mistake that brick and mortar retailers did with e commerce.” — Gavin Baker, Invest Like the Best Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:05:00 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/84da5d17-180b-411f-aac0-520cd84480d9/ https://minutesof.com/q/84da5d17-180b-411f-aac0-520cd84480d9/ “And this has enabled, you know, the top in the industry companies to have gross margins of 35, 40%. And now there's a ton of Neo Clouds that are losing money.” — Dylan Patel, Clockwork Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:18:51 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/026dcdd7-407b-4ef7-b53a-e8b953c43066/ https://minutesof.com/q/026dcdd7-407b-4ef7-b53a-e8b953c43066/ “So what all the hyperscalers are trying to do is develop their own accelerator so that they can reduce this overwhelming cost for equipment to increase their margins.” — Dylan Patel, Dwarkesh Patel Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:02:10 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/32b9ed68-5403-47b2-8224-5391430835dc/ https://minutesof.com/q/32b9ed68-5403-47b2-8224-5391430835dc/ “If it's another deployment, if it's AMD, then that that that 20% power difference might translate to eight or 9% TCO difference when you when you talk about power cost and data center capacity cost.” — Dylan Patel, Open Compute Project Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:01:45 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/b3727da7-5066-4e91-86cd-d25dc8497f23/ https://minutesof.com/q/b3727da7-5066-4e91-86cd-d25dc8497f23/ “So, in most cases, don't on an NVIDIA deployment, right? That's where NVIDIA takes 5x markup on their manufacturing cost, right?” — Dylan Patel, Open Compute Project Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:01:45 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/a5a36fd6-ef64-421d-871a-a04382e1453c/ https://minutesof.com/q/a5a36fd6-ef64-421d-871a-a04382e1453c/ “Most of the inference providers are selling at flat margins or even negative for their public endpoints. And they then make it up when people do private deployments.” — Dylan Patel, Open Compute Project Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:01:45 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/b2443f6f-24bb-433c-a61e-4fea60908146/ https://minutesof.com/q/b2443f6f-24bb-433c-a61e-4fea60908146/ “But then there's also, on the storage side, the drive vendors don't make any money. But Weka and Vast, I mean, look at their pricing models.” — Dylan Patel, Open Compute Project Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:01:45 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/4e249973-cf25-440f-9f24-44741b266928/ https://minutesof.com/q/4e249973-cf25-440f-9f24-44741b266928/ “But then there's also, on the storage side, the drive vendors don't make any money. But Weka and Vast, I mean, look at their pricing models. They make crazy margin on storage.” — Dylan Patel, Open Compute Project Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:01:45 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/2bf1de93-3be6-45eb-a95c-900e0809de32/ https://minutesof.com/q/2bf1de93-3be6-45eb-a95c-900e0809de32/ “Why are we in Amazon? Because we think the retail businesses margins are gonna go up. Jassy has absolutely found religion.” — Brad Gerstner, CNBC Television Tue, 11 Jun 2024 17:21:48 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/ec8d31db-299c-4f2a-a458-c3267d55079e/ https://minutesof.com/q/ec8d31db-299c-4f2a-a458-c3267d55079e/ “And he said, over the course of the next three years, we'll grow our top line 50%, and we'll reduce our personnel costs by 10 to 20%.” — Brad Gerstner, BG2 Pod Thu, 18 Apr 2024 17:23:12 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/6d279606-acc6-4ba3-92f6-4309075c6a9b/ https://minutesof.com/q/6d279606-acc6-4ba3-92f6-4309075c6a9b/ “Now, what does it cost to do that for $7.50 tokens today? And of course, this will go down over time, but it's 10x more, right? It's 4¢ per query.” — Brad Gerstner, BG2 Pod Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:20:31 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/76972eb1-97fa-4a54-a7bb-e71426412574/ https://minutesof.com/q/76972eb1-97fa-4a54-a7bb-e71426412574/ “The re you know, and Dara told you yesterday, quarter over quarter we've actually reduced head count again. Right. We have this massive bottom line opportunity in all these businesses because of AI.” — Brad Gerstner, CNBC Television Wed, 08 Nov 2023 15:35:15 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/c561f67f-6295-4adb-adea-74b83da1688a/ https://minutesof.com/q/c561f67f-6295-4adb-adea-74b83da1688a/ “I think their segment EBITDA margins in January and February for rideshare were over 30%. I believe six quarters earlier, they were negative 20%.” — Brad Gerstner, Invest Like the Best Tue, 23 Jun 2020 09:30:00 +0000 margins https://minutesof.com/q/f5cc2159-f6f7-49c5-b1ac-41466418dd38/ https://minutesof.com/q/f5cc2159-f6f7-49c5-b1ac-41466418dd38/ “Uber just reported their quarterly reports and I think their segment EBITDA margins in January and February for rideshare were over 30%. I believe six quarters earlier, they were negative 20%.” — Brad Gerstner, Invest Like the Best Tue, 23 Jun 2020 09:30:00 +0000 margins